Friday, July 27, 2018

Is there a liberal / progressive / feminist Christian church in Cardiff?

I've spend six months checking out a number of Christian churches in Cardiff, to get the lay of the land, to try to understand the religious landscape of the city.

One of my questions is - is there already a strong dynamic progressive Christian community in Cardiff? My answer is that there is not.

Certainly there are the Quakers, who are active and of course progressive, but their worship is not for everyone.

City URC Church have a license for same sex marriage and so are open and affirming. In the same building on Sunday evening is also The Gathering, a specifically LGBT+ space.

There is no Metropolitan Community Church in Cardiff. If you were looking beyond Christianity to a post-Christian humanist approach, there is also no Sunday Assembly in Cardiff.

We have the Unitarians, but we are very very small.

I expect the Anglicans are fairly liberal, and I'm sure some people would make an argument for a few others.

But all of this might depend on what you consider "progressive". There's of course much to be said about that, but there are at least two short-hand things I would look for:

1. Explicitly open and affirming of LGBT+ people and performing same sex marriages.

2. Explicitly feminist and using not exclusively male language for God.

The second one is very hard to find. There may be churches that would claim to be liberal, but they're still all "Lord, Lord, Lord" in worship, and to me that is not liberal. Some, like myself, still find it alienating and are looking for a more committed feminist liturgy, with greater creativity, passion, and imagination than "traditional" language.

All of which is to say that there is a "space" in Cardiff for an explicitly committed progressive religious community. There is an approach that is needed that no one else is doing right now. So I'm interested in doing it. If you are too, let me know.